Forty Years of American Finance: A Short Financial History of the Government and People of the United States since the Civil War, 1865-1907

UNUSUAL as the problem of excessive public
revenue was in the experience of modern governments, it was not wholly new to the United
States. Almost exactly half a century before, a
similar dilemma had arisen whose results, had they
been kept in mind, might have given some useful
warnings to the financiers of the later period. Between 1834 and 1836, the annual Federal revenue
was doubled. In the first of those two years, as in
the several years preceding them, there was a handsome Treasury surplus, which was applied to reduction of the public debt. Before 1836, however, this
debt was wholly extinguished, and a sudden increase
in the revenue left a surplus for the year of not quite
twenty million dollars -- something unprecedented
in those days. This rise in public income resulted
from an abnormally rapid growth of customs revenue
and a great expansion of receipts from sales of public
lands; both of these movements being stimulated,
in 1836 as in 1888, by a season of interior development and speculation. The customs schedules

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Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.comPublication information:
Book title: Forty Years of American Finance:A Short Financial History of the Government and People of the United States since the Civil War, 1865-1907.
Edition: 2nd.
Contributors: Alexander Dana Noyes - Author.
Publisher: GP Putnams Sons.
Place of publication: New York.
Publication year: 1909.
Page number: 127.

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